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Over the years, I have helped plenty of businesses improve their online presence. I’ve reviewed websites, done keyword research, edited and optimised web content and helped businesses with links, listings and social media.

Local businesses often need the most help, and I am happy to be of assistance where I can – regardless of what the business or organisation does or sells. Funnily enough, when I look back at my list of clients since 2008, some industries seem over-represented in the wide cross-section of businesses that have come to me for help.

I have had multiple accommodation providers, dentists (such as this Coffs Harbour dentist), accountants and physiotherapists as clients, for instance.

Accommodation websites are among my favourites.

I love working on these websites and improving them – making changes that help real potential guests find the site more easily in Google. The basis for any such SEO work is finding specific keyword phrases that potential customers may use and optimising the site for those keywords.

Is your website optimised for search engines? That’s great. The big question, however, is which keyword phrases your pages are optimised for – and do people actually type those terms into search engines?

Many websites naturally rank well for their own business name, brand or product names. Unless your branded names are incredibly common, it’s not hard at all to rank well for these, particularly if the words are part of your domain name or page URLs.

It’s the more generic keyword phrases your target market may be using that you want to know about, so you can optimise your pages for them and get new people (potential customers) who don’t yet know about you to find your website. You want to find the search terms people use when looking for the type of products/services you offer and target those.

There is NO magic number when it comes to keyword density in SEO.

You know that Google – and other search engines – use many different signals to determine how to rank websites on their search results pages. But how many SEO ranking factors can you actually name? 10? 20?

Google says it takes more than 200 factors into account in its ranking algorithm while Bing claims to use over 1000 signals. Of course, these ranking factors are not made public. Search engine algorithms also change over time, with new signals being added and others dropped.

SEO experts have managed to get a pretty good grasp on at least the most imporant factors that play a role in search engine rankings.

Below, I’m listing 50 Google ranking factors that are important in 2011. For easy reference, I’ve put them into three different categories:

Sometimes, website owners want their website (mostly their homepage) to rank well for so many different SEO keyword phrases that there is no focus and in the end, the website doesn’t rank well for any of them.